The invention relates to multi-level database compression. More specifically, the invention relates to data compression at multiple levels of granularity, including building a first dictionary at a first level and nesting the first dictionary with a second dictionary at a finer level of granularity to compress and decompress data while respecting row boundaries.
Compression techniques are important to reduce consumption of resources, such as disk space and network bandwidth. Applying compression techniques in a database system for improving disk space savings and query performance are limited. With respect to database compression, techniques are generally applied to one level of granularity of database objects, e.g. table, row, column, page, etc. However, these current compression techniques that address the granularity do not employ a nesting of multiple levels of compression.